The Survivability and Information Assurance (SIA) course was
originally developed by a team at Carnegie Mellon, led by Lawrence
Rogers (http://www.cert.org/sia/). Back in 2010, I requested a
license to continue the development of the course because it provides
useful information on Information Assurance. Also, this course will
always be freely available for anyone to use in the classroom or
self-study. There are three parts to the LearnSIA curriculum.
1. Principles of Survivability and Information Assurance: This
course presents in detail the ten principles of survivability and
information assurance, on which the entire SIA curriculum is based.
2. Information Assurance Networking Fundamentals: This course
applies the ten principles to the concepts and an implementation of
TCP/IP networking. This is an in-depth look at networking protocols,
namely TCP/IP. There are a lot of exercises that show how to read and
interpret those protocols using Wireshark, formerly Ethereal. The
current tutorials will have to be upgraded to reflect the use of
Wireshark since it was, then, called Ethereal.
3. Sustaining, Improving, and Building Survivable Functional Units
(SFUs). The third part is SIA III, which combines SIA I and SIA II
and uses a fictitious company that the students learn to secure by
setting up secure services on virtual machines. Again, it is also a
very hands-on portion of the course.
LearnSIA doesn't attempt to compete with commercial vendors and it
doesn't offer certifications. Those interested in certifications
should seek out certifications with SANS (http://www.sans.org),
Certified Ethical Hacker (http://www.eccouncil.org/CEH.htm), Security+
(http://certification.comptia.org/getCertified/certifications/security.aspx)
or other security certification vendors. The LearnSIA curriculum
provides a solid foundation for a systems administrator or security
administrator to be able to effectively approach security with a
wholistic view of how it applies to the entire organization. That is
the fundamental approach for the SIA I course.
This is a call for those that would like to help keep this course
updated, help create video tutorials, transcribing audio from the
videos for those that are blind or hard of hearing, maintain lesson
plans, or just proofread. Of course, you can also enjoy free access
to the course. The current needs for participating in developing the
LearnSIA curriculum are all outlined on the website
(http://www.learnsia.org). One important note about the LearnSIA
curriculum is that it is a living course. It will never be in a
"final" state. The content will change as long as the industry
continues to change.
Please join me in this endeavor to provide a good quality, free, and
ever changing course online for anyone to learn.
About the Author
Duane Dunston is an Information Security practitioner for STG Inc. and
has contributed several articles to Linuxsecurity.com and has been in
the Information Security industry since 1997. He is also an adjunct
Information Assurance instructor at Pfeiffer University, his alma
matter ('97 & '99). Duane is a member of the Asheville River Arts
District where he works with silver and copper under the Iron Fist of
Bill Churlik at Earth Speak Arts (http://www.earthspeakarts.com/).
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